Automatic work apparatuses are conventionally well-known in use of various automatic works for specific tasks, operations and services. For example, assembly shop robots assemble parts and weld robots carry out welding operation in the product manufacturing factories. In use of the conventional robotic apparatuses, people first teach the robots the particular operation such that the robots grasp the parts, which are conveyed in a line, in certain timing and put them into a predetermined position to be assembled. Then the robots repeat the motions or replay the behavior as the people have taught beforehand as described above.
However, these robots can consistently do the identically same motion as being previously taught and there is less flexibility of the line designing and part alternation or exchangeability in the production line. Due to the consistent robotic motion, additional and preparatory works as setting parts in a certain position or aligning them by an automatic aligner before the robotic operation starts. Moreover, it is difficult for the robot to grasp the parts which are moving in the conveying line and therefore a sequential operation is necessary such that the parts stop in the line and the robots grasp them for the next assemble motion. This results in rather long time assembly process.
Therefore highly autonomic automatic work apparatus that can observe and detect the objects (we call them as targets hereinafter) which are moving and can take actions for them for assembling or fabrication in a consistent timing matched to the motion of the targets.
On the other hand, various technologies have recently been developed in image processing and several technologies for acquisition and tracking have been disclosed. For example, there is a technology that measures the position of the target and track the motion of the target by using the image obtained monitoring camera that has a finish eye lens (see reference 1). There is a technical paper that reports a robot that traces the ball bouncing by a camera and detects the instantaneous position of the ball and hit it back to the ball player (see reference 2).
Reference 1:
    Published Japanese Patent Application: JP, 06-167564, A(1994)Reference 2:    “A Beach Ball Volley Playing Robot with a Human”, the Robotics Society of Japan, No. 5, Vol. 18, pp 105-111 (2000)
For the case when a general stereoscopic camera that has two objection lens system is used for the position detection of the moving tart, the viewing angle is obtained only for 60 deg in horizontal direction even though the substantially uniform position precision of the image to be specified and detected. For such a narrow viewing angle, it is not possible to consistently keep grasping the target which moves in various directions or to continuously keep detecting and tracking of the position of the target. In order to assist the narrow viewing angle, a high-speed rotational mechanism to drive the camera to direct the target for continuous tracking is necessary. Furthermore, it is difficult to support the simultaneous detection and tracking of plural targets in a wide spatial range in its simple detecting and tracking system in each moment. For the case when a precise action against the moving target is necessary, the conventional detecting and tracking system is not sufficient.
On the other hand, since wide viewing angle is necessary to cover the monitoring in wide range view to follow the moving targets, a technology of stereoscopic application technology using fish eye lenses has been proposed for the purpose of obtaining such wide viewing angles. However, the peripheral sight views cannot provide a well-precise position due to the condensed images in the peripheral area obtained in the use of fisheye lens, which is a characteristic of the lens.
One of the various applications of the present invention is related to the problem described above. Addition to such application, the present invention has further advantages to provide an automatic work apparatus that supports the manufacturing operation.